10 Gallon Ascots

On Saturday I planned to head south for the weekend to the Algarve, in the hopes of visiting a series of beaches and crashing at the nicest for the night. This was the plan anyway. It was a plan that required getting up early and getting a rental car. The French flatmate Gerald, a student of Tourism in a University in Montpellier, was in charge of arranging the car rental. So we got a bit late and headed across town to the Praça de Comercio to get the car. Unfortunately there was no car rental agency anywhere near this plaza and so we spent a couple hours searching for the Hertz building without an address, but rather a general “feeling” of where it was based on the map he had seen. About an hour and a half into the search I really felt the need to say, “In the university courses on tourism, don’t any of the lessons include something like, ‘if you want to find a place you are looking for, you should know the address’, because I think they should add that if not”. These words were literally burning like acid on my tongue for the rest of the hour, but as satisfied as I would have felt had I said that, I knew he already felt stupid about this mess and delay, and as much as possible I am trying to not just say what I want to say, but try and think about what I would want said to me if I were the one who screwed up. So I said something like, “It’s only a couple of hours delay. It’s not a big deal”. But God that hurt to carry this perfect assault in my brain and not let it out. Two hours later we discovered that the rental agency was actually all the away across town.





So we left Lisbon in the afternoon and still managed to hit 4 beaches before we set up tent in a beach outside the town of Aljezur. We set up tent in the dark on a huge empty beach and opened a bunch of wines and gingha (which is a Protuguese cherry liqueur) and made sandwiches of Iberian ham, camembert, and baguette. The gingha I tend to like, but this brand was disgustingly sweet so I threw it out. We hit three beaches the next day, which is fine and dandy, but they all seemed more or less the same to me. The best was Odeceixe (pictured above) if you are ever in the area. For lunch, I tried combining canned tuna and camembert on baguette with pickled vegetables and it actually turned out pretty well. Its a bit franco-morrocan (á la La Belle Vie), and balanced in texture and taste, but that all depends on the raw materials. I would love to hear Dana’s wine recommendation for my new plate. I drank a Sagres beer with it, which is basically one of the four beer choices in Portugal: Sagres, Super Bock, Cintra, and Sagres Bohemia. The first three are all basically Portuguese Nascar beer, the fourth (as the name implies) is a bit darker and you typically drink it with a clove cigarette, black beret, and Camus. The microbrew is just starting to catch on in the more advanced areas of cosmopolitan Europe. This is another oddity for me since Belgium monks (as I’m sure myriad other people across Europe) had been making the best microbrews for generations. But you do not go into a bar in Portugal and ask what’s on tap. You go in and ask for a size and a form: uma garrafa (bottle), chope or presão (draught), caneca (pint), etc. Asking for a brand (there is usually Super Bock or Sagres—exactly the same beer) is typically seen as a waste of the bartender’s time and is often received with a roll of the eyes. Everybody in the United States is making their own beer and have some favorite brand that can be the most obscure beer you’d ever heard of and yet someone in the group will be like, “yeah its good, but its nothing compared to the Surly version of (insert I.P.A, Maibock, etc. here) they did in 2006.” People are following beer in the states like sports fanatics follow stats or hipsters follow b-side reissues of bands that existed for a week in 1978. I can’t quite tell which culture I find more livable, the depressingly streamlined disinterested Orwellian Lisbon, or the fanatically individualized retroshock multi-leveled irony culture of Minneapolis. Someone please help me sort this out.

Minus Something

I’m finding it hard to cope now that Estelle Getty (from NY Times obituary: When Blanche complained that her life was an open book, Sophia witheringly replied: “Your life is an open blouse.”) is dead and with her a part of my youth, also I am currently high on anti-inflammatories, Portuguese Penicillian, and Paracetamol right now (cause it turns out I've got strep throat yet again). I think I just had it less than a year ago and it is awful. Strep throat seems like a misnomer because, although the throat is what hurts the most, there is not a single part on the body that doesn’t hurt when the bacteria build up enough. I guess I did it to myself. I allowed these little monsters multiply in my body because I didn’t want to deal with the bureaucracy involved in a visit to a Portuguese clinic. After several days of no sleep and night sweats alternating with shivers from some physically imagined freeze, I decided that as glamorous as Scarlett Fever sounded I would rather enjoy the rest of my time here instead of becoming the suffering non-artist locked away in reclusion. I spent most of my past two days in solitude listening to “Saturday Night Fry” a radio program hosted by Stephen Fry and Hugh Lorry that my friend Ryan gave me a couple of years ago and I never had the attention to follow completely. Today everywhere I went I saw Hugh Lorry’s face on all the billboards advertising Schweppe’s Tonic saying “Para mim, é claro”. I wasn’t sure if this was a hallucination or not, but I know none of this was here before. My entire diet for the last two days has been entirely composed of valerian tea with lemon ginger and honey with an occasional chocolate covered almond (I also tried my hand at making miso, but found making dashi was difficult when you can’t find dried sardines—Betty suggested I try making Dashi out of bacalhau which I found laughable). Anyway, I think I will get my appetite back when I can swallow. This process shouldn’t take long as I received a penicillin shot in the ass from some sadistic Hong Kongolesen (sp?) nurse before I left the Hospital Inglês in Campo de Orique. I went to this hospital because I assumed things would be a bit more efficient, and it was—I had a needle in me by the time it normally takes me to buy a loaf of bread at Pingo Doce. This was not the only difference I noticed. Not only were there no pigeons allowed in this hospital, it was also the most pristine, blindingly white and sterile environment I’ve ever been in. It was as if I was in some Howard Hughes dream set in the future (my future, not his). I’m so used to seeing dirt and decay everywhere; maybe I was starting to become a hypochondriac as well (I swear the pigeons intentionally cough in my face every chance they get). This is rather disconcerting as I’ve never been troubled by grime, anyone who has ever been to my apartment in Minneapolis can attest to this. The doctor didn’t give me one of those cue tip lab exams where they shove it as far down your throat as possible until you gag and then shove some more. He just put a tongue depressor in my mouth, looked into my ears with one of those ear canal-looking machines, then went to feel my glands and noticed they were bruised on the outside due to the swelling and decided I needed some meds fast. The nurse told me to take down my drawers and stabbed me with authority (and I believe some pent-up rage) and while massaging in the liquid and slowly pressing down the plunger she continuously asked “oooh, sid I hert you?”

So one of the worst weeks I’ve had in awile has followed the best show I’ve ever seen (Leonard Cohen), which I’ll try to upload some clips for your enjoyment. I can count on less than two hands the people who know about this blog and I know less than 10% care anything about Leonard Cohen so you can just skip this part, which will be brief. The genius Cohen at 76, who hasn’t been on tour for 15 years, was as agile as he was in his 20s and his voice has the same vitality and tonality as ever. He played every song I love, and a few I’d never heard of. Sadly though, he did not play my favorite, “Famous Blue Raincoat”. Maybe that was for the best though, it was a song I only heard him play a couple times and once I learned it on the guitar I no longer wanted to hear because I liked the way I did it and I thought if I heard his version again it would affect the way I played it. So its always remained somewhat of a simulacra of sorts.
I guess there is not much more to tell since, except for a wretched presentation I had to do half-dead in class on the chronology of Rap in Portugal, I really haven’t been outside my room very often. Just an interior experience of vague restlessness in a decomposing body without energy, an intellectual itch that was at times sublime, at times unbearable. Like a chicken pox of the soul. Like Pessoa’s desasossego, you know where to scratch, but you have no clue how to reach it.

Europe Gone Fat

Just an update: I talked with my French friend about Pinon today and he said he isn’t a midget and he never was, he just sort of looks a bit like one. So that clears things up for me. But the no subtitles thing is still confusing for me. I mean how many languages do these people know? This is certainly not a challenge one would encounter watching a movie in Block E.



So all the Italians in the apartment and the ones that come to visit whenever we make a “special” dinner (which seems to happen to frequently to be termed special), call me Rocco. My nickname is based on their idea that I look like the doppelganger for Italian porn star Rocco Sifreddi (pictured here). They actually fed me lines and filmed me doing a Rocco impersonation (which to me just seemed like an Italian impersonation of Hugh Hefner (who I know was not a porn star per se (I’m just referring to the robe and self-confident swagger))). It was an Italian commercial that was banned by the Vatican after two weeks of being aired because of the double-entendres used throughout.

Today I finally got some new shoes to replace my broken boots. I got them at Zara for next to nothing and while I was trying them on an old Asian lady approached me and asked if I would do her the favor of trying on a bunch of clothes for her. Well me, I got a heart for “the kindness of strangers” bit ever since I saw “A Street Car Named Desire” so I agreed. It turns out her son is the same exact size and so everytime I came out to show her the outfit on me she would either be very excited or shake her head in disgust. It was kind of like some Avant-Garde version of “Pretty Woman” I guess. So that ate up the better part of the hour and I still hadn’t picked out my shoes, but had a meeting to get to across town within a half an hour and still had to find a shirt to replace the extremely dirty and sweaty one I was wearing. So after I picked out the shoes I went to the young men’s area. This is embarrassing in the United States but due to my odd size many times I can’t find clothes that fit “men”. I figured that would be different in Portugal since, being a part of Europe, people tend to be about my height, and seemingly, my other proportions as well. None of the pants in the men’s section are ever below the European equivalent of 30 waist and rarely seem to be less than 32. My conclusion: (kind of like Screaming Jay Hawkin’s song “Africa Gone Funky”) Europe gone fat. I don’t know if it’s the prevalence of new international fast food chains or the extremely oily diet is catching up to them finally as the shift of peoples from rural to urban environments, and then the shift of the same from industrial sector jobs to the service industry has led to an inability to burn off all these extra calories from the fats they consume daily. Maybe its a little of both. I have noticed that most of the flatmates and Erasmus students I have met have no idea how to cook and say that their parents rarely cook that often either from scratch. This is especially interesting to me as I have noticed the slow food movement catching fire over the last couple of decades in the U.S. has produced the exact opposite effect. Whereas families in Europe are getting busier and both parents typically work long hours (and so opt for quick boxed/canned meals/fast food/delivery), in the U.S. the generations that grew up in Alice Water’s America have opted for a deeper connection with the food they consume and want to be involved in every part of its production. The slow food movement (being directly opposed to fast food by definition) leads one to eat slower, savor the food more, and typically get more nutrients per calorie, which I think has led to a (slightly or partly) slimmer America. What is odd is that this movement started in Italy and has forever been seen as primarily European. The whole attitude goes beyond food consumption and often affects every part of one’s daily life. Typically this means walking or biking instead of driving and blah, blah, blah, blah. Sorry for the tangent, but anyway my argument concludes with the fact that I’m pissed because once again I have to go to the children’s clothing section to buy pants and shirts.

This leads me to my final Andy Rooneyish complaint: So all these Portuguese are lethargic from the food and then tend to be sluggish at work and inefficient (leading me to wait forever in line wherever I go), well then, how do they remain competitive and make up for this lost “fat” time? Driving like maniacs. I already described this a bit so I will only add one more note. Though the Portuguese doesn’t always drive 60 on urban housing streets, they tend to drive faster if someone is trying to get across the street a block up ahead of them. They also change lanes according to how far you’ve crossed the street. This maniacal urge to bear down on a pedestrian cannot be good for their nerves, nor their blood pressure. Portugal, you are heading for a heart attack.

Mad World

I went tonight to the Cinemateca Portuguesa to see a film by Ermanno Olmi “La leggenda del Santo Bevitore”. Olmi was a favorite neorealist filmmaker of mine and I had never seen this film which I assumed would be subtitled in Portuguese. It was not. The film is about redemption, the wheel of fortune, and sacrifice as seen through a bum who is lent 200 Franc with the understanding he would in turn offer it to Santa Teresa during mass which he can never quite make it to because of his early morning drinking habits and a whole cadre of bad influences. Actually the worst influence is the one that keeps turning up throughout the movie played by the midget from “Amelie” and “City of Lost Children”, Dominique Pinon, who oddly enough in this picture didn’t play a midget. This really confused me because, although it seems a non-midget might be able to stretch his method acting prep to portray a midget, a midget can’t really play a non-midget role due to obvious reasons. So either I’ve always been confused, and Pinon was never a midget after all, or he just did a bang-up job of acting like a non-midget. It seems akin to asking a comatose actor to play Hamlet. How does he do it if he is in a coma? I think the answer is probably the Stanislavsky method.

Also, as I told you before I still haven’t received a phone call or a text yet. Well that’s not true anymore since my friend Molly did send me a “What’s grosser than gross” joke through text last night. Well in the theatre I didn’t bother turning my phone off because, well, it seemed ridiculously hopeful to be so haughty and liked as to need to turn my phone off. So when a half hour into the film I got a text and everyone turned around to look at me I severely blushed but didn’t want to disturb the other viewers any further by lighting up my phone and the sound that accompanies turning it off. I mean really what were the odds I would get yet another text before the film ended. I guess after all they were really good because an hour later I got another text. I still did not turn off my phone and luckily that was the last of angry stares due to my phone for the night. One of the texts was an advert I discovered later.

Finally, before I forget I must briefly comment on this David Lynch experience I had this weekend. After seeing Bonny Prince Billy perform for THREE hours on Saturday night I ran into a couple americanas. One was dressed in mall bangs a la small town Midwestern America circa 1984 and head-to-toe outfit to match. I thought this was either brilliant or severely anachronistic. I think I came to conclude the latter after we chatted a bit. Anyway, my flatmates met up with us in Bairro Alto (the main indie bar/ everything bar area) and we wandered for miles to find a bar that was still open past 5. We stumbled into a Fado bar by Restauradores. When we walked in and ordered a couple bottles of wine everything seemed normal except that they were playing Prince in a Fado bar. After are drinks were served the whole room turned red and varied stringed instrumentalists came out of nowhere and our server started singing Fado. The most beautiful I think I’ve heard since Amelia Rodriguez. After three songs the color of the room changed and everything turned back to normal. After about twenty minutes the same thing happened, but this time it was some drunk who walked off the street that started singing in red with these phantom guitarists (they literally just appeared and disappeared- I mean there was like ten people in the bar besides us so its not like I wouldn’t have noticed them before. Well after he finished another guy started up, sang two songs, and then the white colors came back and everyone was ushered out the door. I seriously was not drunk or anything else. It really happened just like that. Seriously.

Salt Fare-North Sea

I am used to bacchanalia, but this last meal I had on my weekly Monday night Lisboa restaurant tour was easily the most ridiculous--most faithful to the roman vomitorium--gluttony I have ever experienced. After class I went home and though I was completely exhausted I decided to go with my brit friend Betty and her Manchester friend Tony to get a drink in Bairro Alto and then off to the Tim Burtonesque new Lisbon fashion designer (highlighted yesterday in the New York Times), Storytailors clothes shop. It was architecturally stunning and the clothes truly belonged somewhere in between the Brothers Grimm darkside graphically and formally seemed to reside amongst a bridge between the early 19th century literary Romantics, Victorian aesthetic, and the haute coulture of Gotham City. Afterwards we drank the best Sangria I’ve ever had, spiked with cinnamon and mint. I split from them to head to my Monday night restaurant pick. I only eat out once a week because even though I am here on a $3200 scholarship, in Euros that converts to about fifteen Euro. The restaurant had a very cheap prix fix meal that sort of blended concepts of Old Country Buffet with really haut Portuguese cuisine and an all you can drink menu that included as many bottles of good red/white wine you want as well as however many decanters of Ruby Port, Portuguese Grappa, and an amazingly delicious Almond Liqueur you wish to imbibe before you presumably make it home. Included are pictures of a few of the courses which started with appetizers from a bar that contained over 70 different selections of Portuguese apps, then the main dish is served (it was bacalhua portuguesa which I again found too salty), then the cheese course (with a selection of 12 different Portuguese cheeses), then the fruit plate, then the assorted nuts and dried fruits (which accompanied the 3 decanters of digestives.)

Today a few schoolmates and I went to the beach. It was a perfect day and I knew I would fall asleep as soon as I got there so I went to the pharmacy to get some high SPF sun block and it was 21 Euro ($33). This is what the meal above had cost me, what the ticket to see Leonard Cohen is also going for, and is equivalent to 10 bottles of Portuguese wine (literally). This country has its priorities all out of whack. More tomorrow on the subject.

Sleepwalk

I used to think that Nick Drake’s songs were only appropriate on drab fall/winter nights, but as my Itunes rambled through the library, I realized they are also perfect for lazy Lisbon summer afternoons. You should try it some time. When the sun hits that midday malaise and the tram rumbles down the tiny rua, the tattered Portuguese flag flows lazily in the wind, and the faded green flat across the street recalls all sorts of ephemeral images rife with melancholic reminiscences of a youth of aimless summers in rural Minnesota; the soft vocals and hollow tones, yet genius attack of Drake’s guitar and the meandering Wurlitzer bring some sort of meaning and design to these final vestiges of the mind’s seemingly random selection of the long-term memory: throwing gummi bears at cop cars when I was 7, throwing an apple at Darlene Haag’s mouth when she was spouting off about some stupid trash, closing my eyes while biking into things. Its all sort of an old-skool Country Time lemonade commercial with scattered events coming back sporadically.

Anyway, the tram almost killed me yesterday. I don’t walk the streets with an Ipod because I need all my faculties in order to not die here. So to better understand this you should know that the tram actually runs somewhat quietly on a two way street the size of about one car. The sidewalk fits about two people and sometimes barely one. As I was walking up the hill to my flat, another person was walking down it to go to the city center. I was stepping off the curb to let the other person pass when I felt something behind me and looked back with one foot heading to the street where the tracks are; and about a foot behind me the tram was zooming up the hill. Defying some feat of gravity I somehow pulled my whole body back on the sidewalk as it flew past me. I usually tend to look before I step into the street but I didn’t for some reason this time and nearly got squashed. Now I look every time. The cars fly down this street as well going 40 or 50 miles an hour around corners that are completely blind and I am amazed I haven’t seen a crash yet. When the tram comes up the hill the cars have to back all the way up the hill to let it pass and they usually go the same speed in reverse. Its all fairly baffling to me so far.

I’ve been pretty sick with a cold all week and not being able to sleep because I can’t breathe I haven’t been able to get any better. There were some pills some former resident left behind in the medicine cabinet that are for “gripe e constipação”. I wasn’t about to take one of these as, though I have some flu-like symptoms, I certainly didn’t like the other half of the remedy which I assumed would open my bowels as well. Then in class today my teacher ask me what I had and I said “o gripe” and pointed to my head and throat. And she replied “ahh…constipado”, and I was like…”uh, no”. Like didn’t she just see my point to my head and not my intestines? Well anyway as you probably already guessed (I was a bit slower on the uptake from no sleep), constipado refers to a constipation of the nasal cavity. So I took the pills at home and so far I haven’t crapped myself.

I guess I should also speak a little bit about my flatmates from time to time. I’ll speak first of the most compelling figure of the lot, Duncan. He is an artist (of the painted sort) and has been living here for quite a long time but has not yet picked up any Portuguese. He got hit by a car on the same street where I almost was hit by the tram. He is sort of vampiric and therefore I mostly see him at night after we’ve both had a few drinks and he usually looks blurry like the photo here. Whenever I try reading wine labels to learn about the grapes used, place of origin, winemaker, etc. he tends to do a quicker translation for me stating “it says shut up and drink it!” He seems to be very fond of Hunter S. Thompson and Keith Richards and has many travel stories that show he more than just studies their biographies and work, but also puts some of this knowledge into practice. Right now he is working on a painting that is a one-eyed dog and his owner. When I asked him if the viewer can only see one eye, or if the dog actually only has one eye, he told me that the dog only has one eye, but you can’t see that its missing because all of his hair covers the missing eye. And so I of course asked if anyone else knew that he only had one eye then. He told me, “the owner knows, and I know, and of course the dog knows, but it doesn’t bother him.” The picture below is not the dog he painted but instead the bitch of a dog that keeps me up every night barking at god knows what from his balcony. If anyone comes to visit me please bring a gun. I am sure customs will be fine with it once you explain the purpose. After the dog gets it, I’m going to the main plaza to shoot all these crazy kamikaze pigeons as well. One shouldn’t have to constantly duck rats with wings every time he goes to the park.

PERSONALITY CRISIS

I’m down to one pair of shoes, and they are staring to hurt. I guess that will keep me off the streets for a bit. My depression-era coal miner boots broke one night while playing an impromptu game of soccer with a piece of the sidewalk that had become dislodged. Half of the sole came off and for the rest of the night it just flopped like a flipper every step I took. On the same street the next afternoon I saw a gang of what are know as the cocaleiros (dealers of coke—I kind of live in a bad neighborhood I guess) doing the same with a very large rat. They couldn’t kick it of course since it was very alive. Rather they sort of chased it between players trying to get it into a small box on either side. When the game was done they stepped on it to (I assume) continue playing the more traditional version of soccer with it. This thing was massive too. I think its teeth were bigger than mine. I declined to join this time. “Not my cup of tea” I said in Portuguese but I guess that doesn’t translate in Portuguese as they all gave me a questioning look. Not that I had anything better to do, but well…not my cup of tea. I truly regret not filming this because it would’ve made an excellent video for this post and my camera actually takes pretty decent videos. My camera is brilliant and my phone (for 20 euros) is incomprehensible but I know if I could figure it out it would be far better than my U.S. one. This is not a problem though since, while everyone in my apartment is texting, calling, and playing Grand Theft Auto on their phones, I have not received a single phone call or text since I got it. Nor have I sent any texts out since all four contacts in my phone live with me and I am constantly with them it seems. This lack of contact can get somewhat upsetting this day in age when the cell phone makes for a great Linus blanket of security when one is in a group but the only one who is not in a conversation. Sending a text message, or even faking sending a text message, says “I too am an intriguing person engaged in profound discussion.”, “I do not need to discuss politics with you, because I am otherwise engaged,” etc. Nevertheless, faking a text message is not an option when everyone around you knows that 1. You don’t know how to use your phone, and 2. Even if you did, who would you be texting except for someone who is, at present, sitting directly opposite you?

I recently had one of the most lucid dreams of my life in which I was standing outside my old high school and, appropriately, talking with a friend who I have hardly seen since high school. We were chatting and from somewhere the song “Personality Crisis” by the New York Dolls was playing in the background and we were discussing the current trends in rock & roll bands revisiting old sounds. We came to the conclusion that the retro sound was accelerating at such a rate and so predictably that after music culture blitzed through the 50s, 60s, 70, 80, and now grunge, brit-pop, it has now become possible to pick up on the next sound with a mathematical equation based on release dates of major albums during the second half of the 90s/ first half of the ots 2000. I woke up to my flatmate knocking on my door and realized I was supposed to be in class at the moment.